Category: Behind the Lens

Kuusamo <> Little Bear’s Ring (Part I) is all about Myllykoski rapids at River Kitkajoki.

A few words about choosing the editing style. At the moment there are basically two kinds of editing styles, slow and fast, which appeal to me. That didn’t make much sense, right?

Let’s dive a bit deeper. When I say slow, I mean something like Italian neorealism https://vimeo.com/68514760 or the long takes Tarkovsky used for example in Stalkerhttps://youtu.be/hUHBgqx8YP8?t=1h2m37s. You might think tranquil cuts and long takes would be perfect for lyrical landscapes in northern hemisphere. But… Yes, there is a but.

Actually there are a couple of buts and the biggest butt (pun intended) was my shooting style. Most of the footage was shot handheld or with camera on the tripod. I wanted to travel light and that’s why I had as little gear as possible with me. If you want to deploy slow takes when editing landscape related film, in my opinion, you need steady majestically flowing footage. Something filmed with flying camera, slider, or some sort of a gimbal (like the latest of my favourite gadgets I can’t afford: Osmo with X5R camerahttp://www.dji.com/product/osmo).
When you ponder the concept of slow style further, you soon realize that the long ”Stalker-like” takes would be utterly boring when filming landscapes only. You would really need a dialogue to make it work or a scene where there’s a lot happening.

Luckily I’m a friend of the fast style also. Requiem For A Dream was released in 2000 and it had a profound impact on me. The visual style was something new to me https://vimeo.com/35706561. There were fast paced cut’s like this: https://youtu.be/0rz9VEDeZcw?t=37m20s and a selfie video done pre-selfie era (I know that’s no proper word): https://youtu.be/0rz9VEDeZcw?t=1h15m22s. It was all most mesmerizing. The style of Requiem For A Dream has since been integral part of my visual arsenal.
Last time I saw this fast style used in an amazing way, was when I stumbled on Visual Japan Diaries made by Birdo The Birdhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdOu0Q4dITBJ-ziuLSg-zITN4UMfhlj0i.
Do you see the influence of Requiem For A Dream? Of course you do! Also, pay attention to sound design. Now, watch one of the Japan Diaries without sound. Huge difference. Never underestimate the importance of solid sound design.

These were few of the things I considered before editing. Of course I didn’t implement all the fast style elements the way I described before, but certainly you can see some influences. If you compare my work to Visual Japan Diaries, you might say my style is incredibly slow. And when we’re talking of sound design you have to understand one thing. The Myllykoski rapids is flowing in the immediate proximity of all the shots. That’s why all you hear is basically loud white noise.

One more thing. Please forgive me for using terms fast style and slow style. I’m sure there is a proper name for them, which I’m not aware of.

I will be using these export settings from now on when I want better 1080p streaming quality in YouTube. What do you think, are these settings an unnecessary overkill?

Let me tell you why I ended up with these settings.I’ve been struggling with 1080p streaming quality in YouTube for some time. Video quality is amazing straight after export, but when uploaded to YouTube videos get this awful compressed and blocky look. It’s really frustrating when you have carefully fine-tuned your footage, but in the end it doesn’t really matter.

With 24 inch monitor you can really see the difference between original and YouTube 1080p HD streaming quality. Then again, if you are watching videos with a crappy tablet or a smartphone the quality issue is nonexistent. A while ago I uploaded this video and it was the last straw. The image quality was so much better before uploading.

Since I knew YouTube is full of videos that look amazing qualitywise, I really needed to sort this matter out. One thing I didn’t mention before. I like to add some grain to my videos as a finishing touch ( http://holygrain.com/ ). In a sense this has been pointless, since YouTube has crushed the grain unseen. In fact I suspect that YouTube doesn’t handle grain very well, that being one of the reasons videos hadn’t looked as good as I wanted.

First i tried to export at higher bitrates up to 75 Mbps, which was recommended here https://youtu.be/MnQDGQAI0yk. The result was better, but not so much i had hoped for. The realization came to me after I watched this tutorial https://youtu.be/tbfDYxjM50o?t=1m50s. So I upscaled the 1920 x 1080 video and exported to 2048 x 1152 resolution. And that was the trick that really made the difference. I’m not sure how YouTube is encoding uploaded videos. I suppose it assigns a certain streaming bitrate for the video depending on the resolution of the original.

Of course there is a catch with my preferred settings. The rendering takes longer and the resulting files are huge compared to something exported as 1080p / 8 Mbps.

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8.4.2015 – The weather forecast said it would be a stormy day. I thought I would have a perfect opportunity to shoot some photos down by the seaside. So I went to Kallo, which is a little rocky island by the Pori coastline (location on map). You can drive there through a narrow neck of land.

After I got to the location I thought it would be better to shoot video after all. I ditched the tripod because I wanted to be able to move fast and smoothly when needed. So I attached variable ND filter, pistol grip camera handle for better ergonomics, RØDE VideoMic and wivi VF-3 DSLR view finder thus transforming my 5D mark III to a run and gun video camera.

Of course there will be some shakiness when shooting handheld. Great help is the EF 24-105mm f/4L lens with image stabilizer and the warp stabilizer effect in Adobe PremierePro.

First I went to the wooded part of the tiny island. The wind was not so apparent there, but you could here the roaring sea nearby. I grabbed few shots in the forest, which I thought would work well in the beginning of the video. Then I headed to the shore. Soon the lightly salty baltic sea water started to dribble on the ND-filter. I was afraid it would cause a permanent damage, but luckily it didn’t. In the edited video a few shots are kind of fuzzy because of this.

Rocks of Kallo. Shutter speed of 1/6th of a second was used to get some controlled motion blur, which should look good in timelapse sequence.

The last take is a timelapse sequence shot with TB3 and motorized slider. The wind speed was around 20 m/s and I knew it would cause some trouble. I chose to go with the idea I had despite the challenges. I wanted to use shutter speed of 1/6th of a second to get some controlled motion blur. Because the camera and the TB3 combination had such a big wind resistance, I knew there was no way to avoid unwanted shakiness and uncontrolledmotion blur. Fortunately the issues could be fixed in post to some extent.

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I’m no boater, but a boat should not be stored in the water during the winter, right? This was the case when I found myself in a small boat harbor by the river Kokemäenjoki. The river was frozen and the scene was quite picturesque. I thought this was a perfect place to test my new motorized timelapse slider and planned to revisit the next day. In the evening I checked the weather report. They actually predicted the next day would be one of the coldest of that december so far.

29.12.2014 – Testing Motorized slider by the river Kokemäenjoki. Temperature is near -20 °C .

My intention was to shoot night to day timelapse with Holy Grail technique ( https://vimeo.com/57265142 ), so I needed to be in the location very early. I had a good plan, but implementation was not up to par. Basically I was late and adjusting the timelapse gear took longer than I expected, although there was a good reason for that; Temperature was near -20 °C . Even little things tend to be hard to do when your fingers are turning blue.

Although it was freezing, the motorized slider and all the other equipment worked quite nicely. Even the battery for the TB3 and the slider’s stepper motor lasted just fine. I did have some difficulties with the knobs of tripod and slider etc. but that was to be expected because the cold.

The camera operator didn’t perform so well. I made a rookie mistake, which is described in the video. Also, I’m not pleased with how I used the TB3 three-axis motion control device. There’s so much more it can do.